Rachel McCrea awarded funding for workshop on interdisciplinary solutions to modern ecological challenges

Forest canopy

Rachel McCrea, Professor of Statistics at the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Actuarial Science, together with colleagues Ruth King (University of Edinburgh), Stuart King (University of Edinburgh) and David Borchers (University of St Andrews) have been awarded £24,000 from the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences (ICMS) to run a workshop in 2023 on Building Interdisciplinary solutions to modern ecological challenges.

The proposed workshop will focus on the leading challenges of modern statistical ecology. Technological advances continue to collect and store data at a faster rate than the associated statistical tools to analyse the data; and at a time when conservation assessment is becoming increasingly important and timely.

The overall aims and objectives of the workshop are as follow:

  1. To establish continued international leadership in the area of statistical ecology, and be at the cutting-edge of the development of advanced statistical techniques that utilise modern digital tools to gather ecological data, including automated devices, citizen science data, and the emerging area of remote sensing data.
  2. To provide a fertile research environment to encourage the cross-fertilisation of ideas across various application areas and academic disciplines leading to new statistical innovations.
  3. To establish new, and strengthen existing, interdisciplinary collaborations particularly across traditional disciplines and early career researchers to enable the next generation of data analysts and statisticians to tackle the challenging questions in ecology.

The workshop will take place at the ICMS in Edinburgh in June 2023 and details of how to apply to take part will be announced later in the year.